Pages

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Behind closed doors

So that birds, bees and
even sheep, have babies, mummy and daddy have a special cuddle. Thankfully,
this is usually done out of sight and so that, when trying to forecast a flocks
fecundity, a raddle harness with coloured crayon is attached to the ram. When
daddy and mummy sheep emerge from their 'bedroom', we can see if he’s been about
his business because she will have a coloured mark on her back.

After he’s had an
opportunity to service all the mummy sheep, the colour is changed. No more
colours should mean that she’s pregnant and doesn’t appreciate further
attention. If not, then she should receive another coloured mark. This
continues through several colour changes until we surmise that all the ewes are
served.

On the scale we do things
on our three-acre permaculture smallholding, this is a set of equipment and a
sophistication we don’t have. However, as you can see, he wastes no time:
within less than a minute of being (re) introduced to his harem this autumn, he
turns on the charm. No need for a raddle harness to indicate his enthusiasm. In
five years, he’s never missed one.

We’ve put the ram to the
ewes slightly later this year. Ewes have a gestation of around 147 days and I
referred to a table in Tim Tyne’s book, TheSheep Book for Smallholders, so we can start to expect
lambs from March onwards.

A new livestock
disease—Schmallenberg virus—that affects cattle, sheep and goats, has come to
town. The disease first appeared in cattle in the Netherlands
and Germany in August 2011. Our vet, Hammadi, told me that he’s seen evidence
of the disease locally. Although adult animals recover after several days, the
virus has also been associated with reports of miscarriages and stillbirths
associated with congenital abnormalities.

One of our sheep gurus, Renée has suggested
a couple of tactics: leave tupping (the ram going about his duties) later in
the year, when the colder weather has reduced the flying insect population and avoid putting this year’s female lambs to the ram. The aim is to avoid ewes
being infected around the moment of conception or to give time for the ewes to get bitten by
infected insects so that they build up immunity before they get pregnant. This
is the latest we’ve put the ram in, so we shall see what that gives in terms of
lambing dates and their health next spring.

In print again:

I’ve written a two part
feature on “The Permaculture Smallholding” for Country Smallholding Magazine. The first part is in the current (November) edition, available in your
newsagents now, with the second part in the December edition available from
October 26th. (They publish a Christmas edition, 13 editions in
year, hence the early publication date.)

This blog:

I started blogging to keep
me sane. We had so much to do when we began that I felt like Sisyphus, rolling a stone up a hill, only to have
to do it all again … and again … I set myself unreasonable daily targets which
I inevitably failed to achieve and so was expending all my energy without
seeing much progress. As soon as I started recording what we got up to on the
blog, it rebalanced things as the sore bones at the end of each day related to
an online record of a load of achievements, plain for me to see.

Titled as a “permaculture
blog”, it became successful, Google-wise, and I thought of trying to record
stuff that would benefit other permaculturalists. There’s a lot of blogs out
there that better serve this purpose. Without any specific intent, it evolved
once more into a tale of our daily lives in support of our holiday cottage
business. The blog has also developed
(through practice) my writing skills and I’ve had many articles published.

I’ve recently looked at
the ‘hits’ on the blog and the majority are people searching for images so I’m
now wondering to whom and to what end I’m blogging. Am I just hollering into the
void? Gabrielle has set up a Facebook page for our gite
and we think that this is the best medium to promote our holiday cottage and I
can contribute blog-style content to it. All of this is to say that I’m going
to stop publishing here but please do visit us on Facebook and our gîte website. Even better, come and visit us in person: rent the gîte, or offer to volunteer.

Hi BothSorry to hear you moving on or should I say off the blog. I have always found it comforting to be able to read of someone else trying the unconventional route to producing food. We need diversity in our production methods for who knows what will face us in the future and what methods will succeed.I wish you well and who knows we may meet for real one day.